Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean review: Features, specs and analysis

Pros

Fast and responsive UI

Excellent overall performance

Great search and notification handling

Plenty of minor upgrades throughout

Cons

Google Now still needs work

Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean is Google's latest refinement of the world's most popular smartphone OS. For now, you can only get Android 4.2.2 on a few devices, including the Google Nexus 4 phone, and the Google Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. It's also rolling out to existing Galaxy Nexus owners, and the newly announced Samsung Galaxy S4 will have it at launch. There's nothing revolutionary about Android 4.2.2, but there are enough significant updates here to cement Jelly Bean's status as a top notch mobile OS.

Android 4.2.2. User interface

For this review, I tested Android 4.2.2 on a Google Nexus 4. As was the case with Android 4.1, the setup process is smooth, and faster than it is with earlier Android phones.

Most of the default options were already checked, for example, and I had no problem adding my existing Google account. Once you're in, the OS holds you hand with a series of translucent tip screens that appear over the home screen and main menu. This walkthrough is definitely helpful if you're new to the OS, though experienced users will already be aware of many of the tips which are imparted.

As we found when first testing Android 4.1, there's more going on here than just minor UI refinements. At Google I/O last year, Google engineering director David Burke talked about Project Butter, which was the company's effort to improve Android performance enough that it feels "buttery" smooth in use. This effort affected many aspects of the OS, such as improved vsync timing for faster frame rates on the display itself, triple graphics buffering for preventing dropped frames in video games, and an improved overall touchscreen response.

In practice, there's definitely a noticeable improvement over, say, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. You can easily resize and move icons and widgets around on each home screen panel, or delete apps by swiping the icon up, which causes it to disappear. The system font ("Roboto") already looked sharp and smooth before, and still does. But menu animations, finger swipes, and scrolling feel at least as solid as they do on iOS, if not better.

Keyboard, browser, and messaging

The predictive keyboard works well. I spent quite some time typing on it, and it seemed to do a much better job than before at guessing the word I meant, even whenever I typed several letters incorrectly. The prediction function works just as it does in Apple iOS 6.1, in that it can figure out what word you want to type even if your fingers are not hitting the on-screen keys directly, just by analysing the grammar of your sentence and by using the built-in dictionary.

For the Swype-inclined, the new Gesture Typing feature attempts to mimic Swype, in that you can now draw out words by gliding your fingertip over each letter on the on-screen keyboard. Google also boosted the predictive text engine to allow for spaces between words, as well as improving the dictionary the engine uses for both voice dictation and typing.

In fact, Android 4.2.2's predictive text engine also tops that of iOS, in that it still shows the bar beneath the text window with possible alternatives – rather than just one the way the iPhone does – and then pops it in with a little animated fade as you continue typing. These are small details, but they're beautiful in action. This is exactly the kind of polish Android needed all along, though the new BlackBerry Z10 on-screen keyboard has turned out to be even better.

The web browser offers smooth handling of multiple tabs, which you can swipe between on a separate screen. There’s one issue here – while auto-rotate is switched off by default, when I turned it on, I noticed some pages had trouble formatting columns of text when flipping between landscape and portrait mode. In other words, the screen would be formatted correctly in one orientation, but would then end up with a thin column and lots of white space in the other.

Adobe has officially dropped support for Flash starting with Jelly Bean 4.1. This doesn't bother me as much as it irks others. Even when it works on mobile devices, it doesn't really work all that well. The end of Flash for Android is hardly a surprise, at any rate, as Adobe said months ago it was discontinuing all mobile Flash development.

In the messaging app, you can tap the new message icon and it pops up names and photos from your contact list as you type letters, including alternate phone numbers which are indented slightly to distinguish them from the primary number. I tested this function with a book of about 1,500 contacts and it was super-fast.

Photo Sphere and Miracast

One of the flagship new features in Android 4.2 is Photo Sphere, which lets you take panoramic-like photos in a series of steps as you spin around in place. The app guides you, showing you little squares on the screen that direct you to each position.

There's plenty of overlap, so you don't have to be super-precise each time you turn a little more. The result isn't just a regular panoramic photo, though; it actually puts you inside of a 360-degree sphere (hence the name) and lets you move around inside. You can rotate up and down as well as to the left and the right.

After creating a Photo Sphere, assuming you like the result, you can either share it on Google+ or post it to Google Maps, or just leave it on the phone. It's a hit or miss feature; sometimes I saw great results with Photo Sphere, while at other times, too many jagged edges and distortions were apparent.

There's plenty of other new stuff, too. One important upgrade is Miracast support. Miracast is a wireless display technology that lets you project the contents of the phone's screen onto an HDTV with a Miracast-compatible wireless adapter attached. Meanwhile, a new "DayDream" screensaver works on the lock screen, and can display Google Currents news, scrolling widget information, or some of your photos whenever the device is idle or placed in a desktop dock. Unfortunately, you can't combine these features.

Google Now and offline dictation

Google Now also gets a significant upgrade. As before, you can access it either via the search bar or by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, the latter of which is handy but takes a little practice (start below the screen and it works perfectly). Google Now uses your location history, email history, search history, and calendar to figure out exactly what you may be looking for and when you'll need it.

New for Android 4.2 are Knowledge Graph-powered search results, which attempt to answer your search queries directly ahead of delivering regular search results. Google Now also gets a host of smaller upgrades, such as upcoming movies, package tracking for UPS and FedEx, flight schedules, and restaurant and hotel reservations.

For example, if you're stepping off a train and heading to your car, Google Now will tell you how long it will take to get home given current traffic conditions. It can tell you're waiting for a bus and let you know when the next one is coming. Unfortunately, this didn't always work for me in practice, but it’s certainly a nice idea.

Google Search itself is more powerful and flexible than it is on other mobile platforms. In addition to the usual voice and text input, the search window shows a series of cards with commonly accessed information. For our office location, I saw the local weather, bus schedule, and a number of cards representing local restaurants with photos, details, and the ability to check in.

As you run new search queries, Jelly Bean adds cards showing the results for each and stacks them so you can access them whenever you want. Search for Chinese food, and Google shows you a series of nearby places in a stack; choose one, and it performs a smooth animation over to Google Maps showing the location and more information. I had to hit Back several times to return to the results list, though. Tapping Results List on the map brought me to an entirely different page, so it seems Google still has a little work to do on the interface here. It's pretty impressive stuff nonetheless.

Offline voice dictation lets you compose messages by speaking to the device even when it's not connected to the Internet – just talk and your words will appear on the screen. I found the offline voice typing worked exceedingly well, and it rarely missed a word I was saying. For now, it only works in English, but Google is working to add support for additional languages.

Notifications, Google Play, and offline maps

Notifications, which were already superior to what iOS offers, now include more information, and let you do more things. Since Jelly Bean has arrived, you can almost navigate an Android handset using just the notification tray. For example, you can expand and collapse each notification and perform basic tasks, such as previewing an incoming email, sending a message from a calendar request, seeing new Google+ or Foursquare updates, or dialling a phone number from a missed call.

Android 4.2.2 in particular adds longer notification vibrations, as well as a new app download notification progress bar. There are also new sound notifications for initiating wireless charging and for low battery alerts.

Jelly Bean also brings proper Facebook contact integration. This takes an extra step, because you need to download and install the Facebook app first. Once you do, a Facebook item appears in the Settings page that lets you integrate Facebook contacts with the phone's address book. It’s still not possible to integrate Facebook's Events Calendar, but that's less of a problem.

With Google Play Movies, you can browse, buy and download media from Google's store. This actually appears as a default icon on the latest Nexus devices. On older devices like the Galaxy Nexus, it's in the app drawer, along with additional icons for Play Books, Play Magazines, and Play Music. Google Play still needs more media partners, but it's a start. The YouTube app gets an upgrade, and it works better over Wi-Fi with a new buffering engine.

There's also more synergy with Android as a media platform now. For example, start watching a movie or reading a book on a tablet with Jelly Bean, and you can pick up where you left off on a smartphone with Jelly Bean. Individual apps like Amazon Kindle already do this, but the ability hasn't been OS-wide, as it is in Android 4.2.2.

As before, Android's third-party app support is robust. Google Play contains more than 700,000 apps, most of which should already work fine with Jelly Bean. One minor improvement: App updates can now be incremental, which improves download times.

For GPS, you still get free Google Maps navigation, which delivers excellent voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions, as well as pedestrian maps, bike routes, public transit schedules, and more. Maps work offline as well – to enable this, you choose it from a pop-up menu, and then select a square area you want to make available offline. As you adjust the size of the map area, Jelly Bean estimates how much storage space this will require. This is a great feature, as it completely eliminates any caching issues with navigation in areas with poor signal strength. Note that you can only expand the offline map size so far, though, before you encounter a "file size too large" error.

Multiple users and other features

Android 4.2 allows multiple users to log into tablets; this way each person has their own custom home screen, widget setup, and email accounts, as well as wallpaper and even apps and games. Your progress through a game and high scores will be saved to your account, but not another user's.

Visually impaired users have access to a new gesture mode that works in tandem with speech, and there's improved Braille support. Ice Cream Sandwich's Beam feature is upgraded as well. Instead of just tapping two phones together to exchange info, you can pair a phone with an NFC-enabled Bluetooth device to do the same thing. You can also send photos and video this way.

As before, the camera app lets you scroll through photos using a new film strip-style view. Pinching a photo and swiping it upwards will delete it. Google had already improved the default camera app tremendously with Ice Cream Sandwich, but these are welcome upgrades nonetheless. The improved camera snaps photos faster than ever, too.

With version 4.2.2, you also get revised Bluetooth and Wi-Fi quick settings, and there are some minor stability improvements throughout. As part of Android 4.2, Google has already released an updated SDK to developers, and the company is working on a new platform development kit (PDK) that lets hardware vendors port Android to their devices more swiftly. While app compatibility across devices has gotten better, it's still an issue, so it's good to see Google redoubling its efforts to aid developers.

So which devices will get Jelly Bean 4.2.2? That's the big question mark. The web page orientation and formatting bug I mentioned above is a perfect example of why OS updates need to happen frequently, and quickly. Today's devices are way too complex – it's not just about new features. If, say, Android 4.2.3 appears soon with a fix for the formatting bug, but networks/vendors sit on the update for months before releasing it, consumers are stuck. In some cases, not only are carriers holding back or not upgrading Gingerbread phones to Ice Cream Sandwich – much less Jelly Bean – they're even holding back incremental updates. Which is frustrating to say the least.

Comparisons

While four major players remain on the smartphone scene, Jelly Bean 4.2 cements Android's status as a star platform. It's already the larger of the top two mobile operating systems available today (beating out Apple's iOS by a significant margin), and still offers the most flexibility for the most people. But that's not the main story here. Android 4.2.2 is refined, powerful, smooth, and attractive. Just focus on the software, and Jelly Bean still shines.

In comparison, Apple iOS remains easier to use, still has the best multimedia platform and accessory support (speaker docks, cases, car stereo support, and so on, although the new Lightning connector has made this more difficult). It still benefits from the best app store on the planet, one that's larger, more organised, and better stocked with quality apps. And the Apple App Store alone can tilt the buying decision for many consumers, because the difference in what's available and what's actually good is pretty striking. The iPhone also has zero bloatware; it remains to be seen what happens to Jelly Bean as various networks begin selling phones and adding adverts and other miscellaneous services.

In fact, it's extremely difficult to weigh these two operating systems against each other. In this review, we're focusing on the software first and foremost. We're not going to give many points to Android just because it appears on a wider variety of form factors, and because some Android devices are larger and faster compared to the iPhone. Android’s true strength is that the OS looks and feels just as refined to us now, while offering more practical features like improved search and the same kind of quality keyboard iOS has had all along.

The other up-and-coming competitor here, aside from the aforementioned BlackBerry 10, is Microsoft's mobile entrant, which received a ground-up rewrite in Windows Phone 8. It's a fun-to-use OS that's especially good for beginners and social networking mavens, and it's quietly becoming a stellar gaming platform on its own.

Verdict

Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 is a solid OS that will likely make your next Android phone purchase even better than it would have been otherwise. Unfortunately, the chances you'll see it soon as an upgrade for your current phone are slim, and, as we've seen with each successive version of Android, it could be quite some time before it even appears on many new handsets. More than anything else, this fragmentation issue is what we'd like to see Google tackle with the next version of Android. In the meantime, Jelly Bean stands as a top notch all-round mobile OS.

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